May's well underway and all the preparations for the S2G Forums in Amsterdam and London are complete. These S2G Forums are the premiere place for people in Europe to get access to the best information related to the Spring community (at a minimum cost!). I hope we'll see you in Amsterdam (May 26, 2011 - € 114 ) and / or London (May 31, 2011 - £ 99)!

In the interim, those of you that want an even better picture of how the Spring framework plays on the nascent CloudFoundry open-source cloud PaaS project should be sure to attend a webinar - Spring from Zero to Cloud in 60 minutes for both North America and Europe in just 10 short days!

1. SpringSource Tool Suite 2.6.1 Released. This release features the usual updates and features. Some particularly notable features: an updated bundled version of vFabric tc Server, version 2.5, improved support for tc Server instance creation and an update to the latest release of Spring Roo, version 1.1.3 and (yay!) bundled support for CloudFoundry. Check out the New and Noteworthy PDF document for the details.

	<li> The  <A HREF="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/">CloudFoundry blog</a> has run two different parts with a detailed look at  what happens when you <code>push</code> applications to the CloudFoundry project. The first post details what happens from the <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/4737632136/what-happens-when-you-vmc-push-an-application-to-cloud">client-side perspective</a>. The second post provides details on what happens from <a href="http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/post/5223861703/how-cloud-foundry-works-when-a-new-application-is">the cloud-side perspective, once the…

Dear Spring Community,

I'm pleased to announce that we just released the first milestone build for the next release of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

Appearing shortly after the 2.6.1 maintenance release, this milestone brings mostly new features for Groovy&Grails developers, including:

• Groovy 1.8 support
• Conditional breakpoints for Groovy
• Search inside GSPs
• Early access Gradle support

More details can be found in the New and Noteworthy for 2.7.0.M1 document. Detailed installation instructions are also available, please look at the installation from the milestone update sites.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page, check "Other Downloads".

The second milestone…

Dear Spring Community,

We are pleased to announce that the third milestone release of the Spring Android project is now available!

Spring Android supports usage of the Spring Framework in a Android environment. The 1.0.0.M3 release focuses on extending the use of Spring Social in native Android applications. This includes:

• Support for Spring Social 1.0.0.M3 through the new Spring Android Auth module, which includes a SQLite datastore for persisting API connections. Spring Social is currently supported in Android version 2.3.1 (API Level 9) and higher.
• Updated RestTemplate (client) support, now at the level of Spring Framework 3.1.0.M1.

To get the software, download the release distribution, or simply add the maven artifacts to your project. To see the features live, check out the spring-android-showcase (updated for 1.0.0.M3):
git clone git://github.com/SpringSource/spring-android-samples.git; cd samples/spring-android-showcase; more README

In addition to the reference guide, Roy Clarkson has authored two blog posts to help you get started developing Android applications:

• Spring Android and Maven (Part 1)
• Spring Android and Maven (Part 2)

If you're building native Android applications, we invite you to collaborate with us on the Spring Android project!

The Groovy language is an excellent platform for creating domain specific languages (DSLs). A good DSL can make programs more concise and expressive as well as make programmers more productive. However, until now these DSLs were not directly supported by Groovy-Eclipse in the editor. When DSLs are used heavily, standard IDE features like content assist, search, hovers, and navigation lose their value. For a while now, it has been possible to write an Eclipse plugin to extend Groovy-Eclipse, but this is a heavy-weight approach that requires specific knowledge of the Eclipse APIs. Now that…

Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce the new release 2.6.1 of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

The release brings you:

• vFabric tc Server 2.5 packaged and supported
• Bugfixes for tc Server instance creation

More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in the New and Noteworthy document. Detailed installation instructions are also available.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page.

It's May, already! Seems like just yesterday we were toasting the arrival of the new year...

As they say, time flies when you're having fun! This year's been a roller coaster - exciting news and events every day - too much to keep up with, certainly!

1. Jon Brisbin has written up an epic post introducing the CloudFoundry project and many of the technologies that you can use on it.

   This was just put up today, and is now one of my favorite blogs introducing CloudFoundry; it's so ambitious, just like CloudFoundry itself!

2. Another masterpiece of a sample is the blog that Costin Leau wrote, Getting Started with Redis and Spring Cloud Foundry. This post is well worth reading whether you're doing CloudFoundry, Spring Data, or both. A dynamic duo, indeed!

<li>European community members can learn more about Spring, Spring Data and Cloud Foundry at the S2G Forum Series: <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam…

Traditionally, applications have been defined by the principle technology they use. If you're building a Spring MVC application, we call it a "Java app". Since our application is primarily composed of Java components, we tend to stay in our own yards and not be terribly friendly with our neighbors until we're forced to interact with them. We set up Java-based application servers and tend to think first of going to the Java language to solve a problem in our application whether that language is the best choice or not. It has usually just been too difficult to maintain multiple sets of runtime…

We're pleased to an announce the second release candidate for Spring Security 3.1

Please see the changelog for a full list of updates.

The release is available from the Spring Community Downloads area and also from the SpringSource maven repository.

Download | Changelog | Reference Manual | FAQ

Another week, another great allotment of new content that - as usual - draws from the community and from SpringSource. The enthusiasm for CloudFoundry continues unabated this week, with some interesting content in this week's roundup. For more content on CloudFoundry, you might consult the CloudFoundry.com and CloudFoundry.org sites. In particular, the slides from the Cloud user group held the day after the announcement are available here.

1. Oliver Gierke has posted a blog on Advanced Spring Data JPA which explains how to use the features in the Spring Data JPA project that elevate the art of JPA programming, like the integration of the QueryDSL library. This post - and the library - speak to the ongoing, first-class support in the Spring frameworks for all data access technologies, be they RDBMS, NoSQL, or anything else.
2. Peter Ledbrook, Grails Developer Advocate, has recently expanded on his original blog on using Grails and CloudFoundry.

   This blog provides a detailed look at using Grails' GORM support with the various data stores available on CloudFoundry. Check it out!

3. Alex Popescu's MyNoSQL portal, MyNoSQL, has some interesting comments about the NoSQL options supported in CloudFoundry. He comments that "From a storage perspective, Cloud Foundry is encouraging polyglot persistence right from the start offering access to a relational database (MySQL), a super-fast smart key-value store (Redis), and a popular document database (MongoDB)."
   This post - and indeed the entire site - is a very valuable resource for CloudFoundry users that want to exploit the NoSQL options, but don't understand the use cases yet. There's a lot of good content on both MongoDB and Redis, for example.
4. Mark Thomas, Apache Tomcat 7 release manager and engineer, has written up a post on Apache Tomcat 7's session fixation protection security feature on the TomcatExpert.com website. Keeping on top of the latest Tomcat security features is important if you are, like the majority of developers, using Tomcat (or hardened, ops-friendly derivatives like SpringSource's tcServer) as a production server for your Java (and often Spring) applications. Additionally, Tomcat's bundled with several application servers. Either way, knowing about Tomcat's industry-leading features can only help.
5. Costin Leau has announced the Spring GemFire 1.0.1 release, which incorporates bug fixes and promotes stability.

<li>Just a reminder to our European community members, the S2G Forum Series will be held in <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-26-2011-amsterdam">Amsterdam (May 26th)</a> and <a href="http://www.springsource.com/events/s2gforum-5-31-2011-london">London (May 31st)</a>. There will be tons of great sessions about Spring, Groovy and Grails as well as talks focused specifically on CloudFoundry, Tomcat and Gemfire so be sure to <a href…